BOOM...... BOOM...... BOOM.......
Heaven and earth were rumbling.
Riyan slowly raised his hand and placed it on his chest. It definitely wasn't his own heartbeat.
Then there was only one answer.
‘The crowd must be stamping their feet.’
What had filled his past life was the battlefield.
He still remembered how the legionaries, with their backs to the water before the monsters, had stamped their feet over and over, burning with resolve.
Was that why?
Feeling a rare exhilaration boiling up in him, Riyan placed his hand on his scabbard. The snug feel of the leather scabbard calmed his mind again.
“It's your turn.”
A guard wearing a breastplate signaled to Riyan as if it were a bother.
With that, the heavy iron door slowly began to rise.
At the same time, light poured in.
Literally blinding light poured in. Probably because beyond this iron door was the passage connected to the Arena.
In any case, light pouring into the waiting room, dark and dank like a cave, felt like a strange experience in itself.
As if he had stepped onto the path to heaven.
BOOM—! BOOM—! BOOM—!
Riyan stepped toward the stairs.
At the same time, the vibration, which had been relatively faint while the door was closed, grew clearer the farther he went.
- Kill! Kill! Kill!
- Yabrik! You butcher bastard, croak already!
Among the noise droning in his ears, a few voices could be made out, but Riyan lightly ignored them.
This, of course, was also Eldred's teaching.
‘Once you have set foot on the battlefield, the only things you can trust are yourself and your sword. Everything else? Fuck all of it.’
His words had come true almost like a prophecy.
Hadn't he actually been betrayed by his comrades and had his chest pierced by a sword?
Smiling bitterly, Riyan concentrated on gradually turning his surroundings into his own flow.
The texture of the sand crunching underfoot is nice.
That was Riyan's small impression as he set foot on the Arena.
- WOOOOOH!
That giant's howl sounds just like a pig in heat.
That was likewise Riyan's feeling upon seeing Yabrik standing opposite him.
Hssssss!
So that's a Masterpiece? Hideous.
That was his impression of the weapon leaning against the man's shoulder, spilling out a gloomy, dark-red aura.
- BWOOOOO!
At the same time, the sound of the horn rang out, burying the cheers of tens of thousands.
A moment of stillness.
What broke the ensuing silence was the mouth of the showman atop the podium, who was in charge of the Colosseum's atmosphere.
Wearing a glossy red silk robe with fox fur splendidly draped around his neck, he raised his hand, veins bulging.
“Subjects of the Empire! Here, today, witness the new song that the Empire's seat of judgment shall give birth to! Will it be a funeral dirge in praise of Yabrik, who has carried on his own executions until now, or will it be the epic of the gladiator Riyan, the prodigy who made his existence known by slaying a monster in the face of adversity?!”
At the showman's bellowing speech, the silent crowd went wild once more.
Stamping their feet, shouting, waving their hands.
Half were curses aimed at Yabrik, and the other half were cries anticipating Yabrik's execution.
Compared to the previous atmosphere of constantly mocking and condemning Yabrik, it was a fairly well-balanced scene. And that was the showman's role.
Contrary to that atmosphere, however, Yabrik was quite calm. He even leaned his upper body forward slightly to meet the eyes of his smaller opponent.
“Riyan, was it?”
At Yabrik's question, Riyan slowly nodded.
“That's right.”
“You killed a monster?”
“I did.”
“Strange.”
Yabrik tilted his head.
At that, Riyan shrugged.
“Either scared or bold. It should be one or the other?”
“Yeah, that's it. That's what I wanted to say.”
“Does it matter?”
“It doesn't.”
Yabrik bared his white teeth and moved his arm.
The massive battle-axe whirled through the air with a whooshing sound.
Riyan's eyes followed its trajectory. Up, down, left, right. At the same time, that unprecedented sensation unfolded once again.
A huge red circle. Yabrik's was large and wide. Much more so than those of the instructors he had fought at the school.
At the same moment, Riyan threw himself aside.
To find a safe spot within the flood of red aura.
THOOOM!
In the blink of an eye, the axe came down.
At the force and roar that seemed enough to split the Arena, the whole place fell silent for a moment.
But soon the rising dust cleared, and when Riyan couldn't be seen at its center, cheers rang out again.
- He dodged! He dodged it!
- Fight, Riyan! Kill that butcher bastard!
Meanwhile, having thrown himself aside to dodge the axe, Riyan rolled once and stayed curled up in a crouch.
Then he extended his left hand slightly forward and let the sword in his right hand hang slightly.
At the same time, the fingers of his left hand moved strangely. His index finger twitched minutely, as if counting something.
From Yabrik's point of view, it looked like a little deer thrusting out its slender antlers, and he sneered.
The sneer was brief, of course.
Riyan's crouched body straightened and shot forth like a bolt of lightning.
“Hup!”
With a tingling sense warning him, Yabrik turned his axe on its side. He hadn't seen it and then acted. It was an instinctive movement. So much so that he couldn't explain even to himself why he had done it.
SKRRRNG!
But instinct saved Yabrik.
Near his thigh, the axe and sword collided with a rough metallic screech. Riyan had swung his sword as he brushed past to the side.
‘This bastard?’
Yabrik had executed countless people in all sorts of ways.
He instinctively knew where his opponent had aimed.
The femoral artery in the thigh. A major vital point that, if slit, would quite literally set off a fountain of blood.
Aside from a breastplate that barely covered his chest, since anything more was cumbersome, he wore no protective gear, and his opponent had aimed at the most lethal spot of all.
“You little rat.......”
Before he could even finish speaking, this time the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.
It was already too late to turn the axe, so Yabrik practically threw himself forward and rolled once.
Then he saw the iron sword tracing its trajectory.
Exactly where his right arm had been.
Watching it from an awkward half-crouch, Yabrik burst into laughter.
“HAHAHAHA!”
He sensed danger. How long had it been since he'd felt that?
Yabrik's mad laughter spread out across the Arena.
“It's been a long time since I felt like this.......”
Yabrik's bold words didn't make it to the end.
His opponent's eerie black eyes moved up and down again, and he instinctively had to step back.
Normally, after a flurry of attacks, the natural flow was to trade jokes or curses while catching one's breath.
Yabrik gradually began to panic at the unprecedented situation.
CLANG! CLANG!
From top to bottom, and when that was blocked, Riyan used the recoil to spin his body again and slash at the waist. When even that was dodged, this time he used centrifugal force to aim a spinning back kick at the temple.
At the relentless onslaught that left no room to breathe, Yabrik's eyes grew bloodshot.
Should he give up one and split the kid's head?
No, impossible.
The moment he gave one up, it would be over. His opponent had attacked only the most fatal spots, relentlessly.
SHLK!
In the end, a blade grazed his forehead, and blood flowed.
The blood running down between his brows soaked his eyes. When he raised his left hand to wipe the blood away with the back of it, the iron sword traced a cunning trajectory, aiming at his hindered left field of vision.
“Gahk!”
Despite twisting his body, the blade burrowed in like a snake, and his ring finger and pinky were cut off.
Clenching his teeth, Yabrik swung his axe to counterattack, but Riyan had already slipped away like a loach and widened the distance again to prepare his next attack.
‘Wooden...... a wooden doll.’
Yabrik felt as if he had become a wooden doll. One that had been set up to be beaten however one pleased.
“KRAAAAH!”
Letting out a bizarre roar, Yabrik gripped the axe with both hands.
I'll kill him. I'll kill him no matter what.
His head burned as if on fire with uncontrollable rage.
At the same time, his eyes began to turn red.
At that sight, Riyan, who had been about to attack again, instead stepped back about two paces.
‘Strange.’
He had been steadily crushing Yabrik's domain.
With just a little more time, Yabrik's domain would have been covered without a trace by Riyan's white.
But after that bizarre roar just now, Yabrik's aura had started to run wild again.
‘Something's changed.’
One didn't need keen senses to tell.
Anyone would have been able to see the dark-red aura spewing from the axe wrapping around Yabrik's entire body.
‘Is that the power of the Masterpiece they call a magic weapon?’
If he was an Old Knight who had faded away over the years.
His opponent was a New Knight who had newly appeared with the birth of the Empire.
It was also a good chance to test their powers against each other.
Spinning his sword with a whoosh to take his stance, Riyan fixed his eyes on Yabrik.
‘First, stamina.’
Yabrik had no small number of wounds, including the one between his brows and the severed fingers. He had lost quite a lot of blood, and the symptoms that would naturally follow were clear.
Dizziness, nausea, shortness of breath, and so on.
Yet right now, Yabrik looked twice as vigorous as he had at the start.
‘Second, senses.’
His own white circle was narrowing. So much so that it felt like a castle he had painstakingly built was crumbling like sand.
‘Third...... destructive power, is it?’
The dark-red aura billowing up from Yabrik's body.
The blood running down his chin evaporated with a fizz the moment it touched that aura.
And that aura was clearly most concentrated in the axe. It would probably cleave mercilessly through anything it touched. Like the pale blue aura that Eldred, or he himself, had once drawn out.
A problem was a problem.
To attack, he had to thrust his sword, and that meant entering the reach of that aura-laden axe.
But Riyan didn't think much of it.
‘Then I'll end it without it touching me.’
In truth, the answer was simple.
So what?
No matter that he reigned over the Colosseum, no matter that he had received a magic weapon called a Masterpiece and gained the power to wield mana, no matter that he had trampled countless gladiators until now.
In the end, he was a flower raised in a hothouse.
He could know when he would fight, know where he would fight, and decide how he would fight. On top of that, he could choose familiar equipment, and even pick his opponents.
Compared to Riyan, who had fought life-and-death battles against monsters of every unimaginable kind in the worst possible environments, the experience they had accumulated could not even be compared.
- There it is, there it is!
- The Masterpiece! The power of the Masterpiece!
At some point, the heat-haze-like aura rising behind Yabrik had taken the form of a blazing wolf.
“I'll devour you.”
Yabrik, his eyes pouring out red aura, spat out a short threat and began striding forward.
With an echo that sounded like a wolf's growl.
But Riyan shook his head.
“That won't happen.”
CLICK!
Riyan slowly took an ampoule out from inside his coat. It was the one he had prepared after visiting the Imperial Capital's market with Haral.
Riyan opened the stopper using only his thumb. Then he tipped it into his mouth. The surroundings were hazy, eaten away by the aura Yabrik was spilling out, so there was no need to even hide it.
“.......”
Riyan smiled faintly.
It was a nostalgic sensation.
Until now, his body had been unstable, so he hadn't been able to draw out even a toenail's worth of his past life's power.
But this moment would be different.
Hssssss!
Blue light began to swirl in Riyan's eyes.